Blake Society Talk: Timothy Morton: The Marriage of Religion and the Biosphere
The next Blake Society meeting sees Timothy Morton propose a new take on Christianity inspired by Blake, aimed at taking on white racism, miscogyny and global catastrophe. 17th April. Free to attend.
The meeting took place on 17th April 2004. The podcast audio and video are linked below.
Podcasts
Book Review
Video
The Blake Society convened on Zoom on Wednesday 17th April 2004 to hear from Timothy Morton about their new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, and how they have taken Blake as their inspiration on a mission to bend, reroute and reorder the heartlines of Christianity. The talk will be chaired by Andy Wilson of The Traveller in the Evening.
Hell on earth is here. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can yet fathom. As Timothy Morton’s new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, shows, escaping global warming hell requires a radical mystical marriage of Christianity and biology to awaken a future beyond white male savagery.
Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings deeply resonate with ecological thinking. Together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. Morton calls for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic Mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction.
Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of Being Ecological (2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), ten other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.
Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is published on Earth Day (22 April) 2024.
The Traveller in the Evening
Andy Wilson lived in Sunderland, Seaham Harbour, Peterlee, Hartlepool, Kings Lynn, Coventry, Torpoint, Eastleigh, Lee-on-Solent, Portland, Weymouth, Loughborough, York and Liverpool before dropping anchor in London. He runs the blog The Traveller in the Evening: Reflections on William Blake, Radical Theology, Politics and Surrealism, founded Reservists Against War and co-founded the Association of Musical Marxists (AMM). He is the author of Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970-75 (2006), Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram (2013), and The Brilliant New Hercules: A Blake Reader (2015). With Michael Tencer he edited The Assassin (2014), and with Jules Alford, Khiyana: Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution (2015).
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